The Family of William Warner and Sarah Leitch
You weren’t expecting to see a post about Kentucky on a website about a family who’ve lived in Canada for the past two hundred years. But we do indeed have ties to that part of the world. Ruth, my lovely wife of fifty-one years was born on the banks of the Tug River in Goody, Kentucky.
Twelve years ago, in the summer of 2014, Ruth and I spent several sunny weeks roaming and documenting six of the cemeteries in the area where she grew up.
Continue readingI’ve been spending some time lately learning about the time my mother, Lorraine Parker, spent working in the Farmerette Brigade of the Farm Service Force. It was wartime, and the program recruited girls and young women, aged sixteen and up, to work on Ontario farms at a time when most young farm workers were overseas fighting the enemy.
In return for their service, the participants were typically allowed to graduate (they called it junior or senior matriculation then) without attending the last month of classes or writing their final exams.
My mother served during the summer of 1945. I’ll tell you about that in another post very soon. But what I’m excited about right now is my very recent discovery that my Aunt Betty, my father’s sister, also served.
Continue readingHelen Price (1898–1967), my grandmother, attended Ontario Ladies’ College (now Trafalgar Castle School) during her sophomore and junior years (the school years 1912–1913 and 1913–1914). We don’t know where she had spent her freshman year, but we do know that she left O.L.C. in 1914 to spend her senior year back in Toronto, at Malvern Collegiate.
Continue readingIt was with much sadness that I recently learned of the passing of John Penelton in April of last year. He was my father’s first cousin and the only son of my grandaunt, Ruby Warner, and her husband, George Carman Penelton.
Continue readingEaster of 1899 wasn’t Helen’s first Easter, but it was the first one for which she understood, in her way, what was going on.
My grandmother, Helen Fredrica Price, was the fourth child and second daughter of Joe Price and Lizzie Leslie. She was born on January 5, 1898, making her three months old when Easter arrived on April 10, 1898.
By the time of her second Easter, on April 16, 1899, she was a precocious child of fifteen months.
Continue readingIt’s been almost five years since I first told you the story of my great granduncle Thomas Benson Warner, an older brother of my great grandfather, Harold Warner. I told you how Tom seemed to drift from job to job, moving back and forth between Toronto and New York City, how his first wife Maria died tragically young, and how his right hand was crushed in a trainwreck (a life-altering injury for a typesetter, as Tom was).
Continue readingI was honoured to be asked to give this presentation to the Governor Simcoe Branch of the United Empire Loyal Society of Canada on March 6, 2024.
It tells the story of my Loyalist ancestor, my fifth great grandfather Samuel Wells of Brattleboro, Vermont. You can watch the presentation here, or read the story below.
Continue readingThis is the story of my Loyalist ancestor, Colonel Samuel Wells.
He ran an underground courier network, in the final years of the American Revolutionary War, that provided a vital communication link between the British commands in the cities of Quebec and New York.
Continue readingWhen you do family history, every so often you get that big breakthrough — the moment when you find a missing puzzle piece that has eluded you for years.
This, for me, is one of those moments.
Continue readingIn 1966, my parents (Joe and Lorraine Warner) bought a farm near Markdale, Ontario. Well, it wasn’t really a farm. It was half of a hundred-acre property in farming country.
Over the next fifty-seven years, it’s been a resort, a refuge, an activity hub, and a home for five generations of the Warner family.
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